


Sylph of Light Exposition

by Val_Ritz



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 00:06:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Ritz/pseuds/Val_Ritz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short abbreviated history of my in-character self I use for my Tumblr blog. Uses Homestuck universe mechanics but no canon characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sylph of Light Exposition

I’ve been alluding to the sessions and history of myself as a Sylph of Light for roughly forever now, so I suppose I should exposit some on the nature of where I came from. Plus this totally helps in my mission to blur the fuck out of the distinction of whether or not my blog is in-character or not.

My session started like many others, with a game by the name of Sburb. It was developed by a little indie game company nobody really knew about by the name of Spirograph Software. Now that I’m thinking back on it, they didn’t really have much of anything else, but the hype surrounding the closed beta of Sburb was enough for me to sign up. What little I could find led me to believe it was exactly what I wanted; extensive class system, world-building, obscenely vast crafting, lore comparable to Dwarf Fortress.

I received my copy on June 13th, not long before my birthday, and that’s when shit started going down. News reports of meteor showers, even isolated impacts. It was an astronomically unprecedented occurrence. I found a few people to play with, noting the lack of a single-player campaign (at the time a mild annoyance), and we joined the game. The first few hours went as is usually expected of a game of Sburb, the rush to enter, the placing of the alchemization equipment, the prototypings. Incidentally there were six of us, our entry prototypes being a pool cue (mine), a shitty top hat, half a bottle of cooking sherry, a DVD of Goodfellas, a full fucking suit and a deck of cards, because I guess four of us wanted drunken mobsters and two of us wanted Victorian England. It was a bizarre as fuck combination. Our classes were a Sylph of Light (me), a Witch of Void who I despised on a primal level, a Seer of Heart, a Knight of Hope, and a Rogue of Space and a Thief of Time who constantly were being annoying little shits with their powers. Man, we thought we were hot shit.

Our session was kind of different than others I’ve seen in that there was a much heavier emphasis on the role of our titles; as a result we all developed at least some aspect of our powers before hitting the end of our echeladders. The main conflict with our session was the Witch of Void that showed up. See, I’m a Sylph of Light. I’m indelibly bound to fortune, coincidence, and secret knowledge. For this reason, I hated this person for manipulating the lack of those things as weapons. Now, our Seer of Heart managed to keep us from getting at one another’s throats for the most part, but there’s only so much a class based on intuition and feeling their path can do when confronted with the task of keeping apart two of the most diametrically opposed titles in existence. Long story short, we got in a fight. She ended up revealing fucking terrible secrets that she’d been hiding, both Aspect-wise and just in general. One of those secrets was an artifact hidden away in the core of her world, an artifact with decidedly grimdark leanings called the Malignance. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, because prior to this she had kept it under wraps like a Witch of Void normally does, but in one last one-up she used it. Instantly all life on all the planets in our Medium beside my teammates was wiped out, destroyed in a Vast Gasp that consumed it all. Our Witch of Void became one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen, wielding the power to obliterate everything that ever existed or would exist. She started with Skaia. Seeing the only source of light I’d known for months just... gone... It was suffocating.

Of course we fought back. We didn’t know how, but we did. The Seer of Heart had a BSOD the first time around, just curled up with his hands over his ears whispering “I don’t know” over and over again until the Void reached out and ate him. I thought our Rogue and Thief would be able to stop her, but the Thief cut and ran and the Rogue was no match for her. I think honestly I wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for the Knight. She’d completed her Genesis Burst sidequest, and had managed to max out her Alignment Tankard through the game thus far. I still see her when I sleep, wings of brilliant white, brandishing her lamppost against a writhing mass of cackling Void energy with the Witch at its heart. She held out like a fucking champ that day; striking with the certainty only Hope players can have, screaming with every action “YOU WILL OBEY.” She was a goddamn archangel facing down the end of days.

Unfortunately, in the Void between all things even Hope is swallowed up.

Enter me. I’m a Sylph. I don’t have vast lasers or game breaker luck or wings made of fucking hope energy. The Witch was battered and tattered, but I know at any moment she could have snuffed me out like a damn candle. So what did I do? What sort of ridiculous deus ex machina did I pull?

I talked.

I monologued into the Void about Sburb, about what I’d learned, about mistakes I’d made. I talked for what seemed like hours, and all the while she looked at me, soaking up the words like so much dripping water. I talked about the history of the Land of Ebony and Ash where I’d lived, about the huge black temples lit with gray braziers of wrought iron. I talked about the carvings I’d seen and deciphered, and one that I had never understood. It had been a relief of the stylized sun from my Quest Bed, placed opposite a carved-out sphere surrounded by what looked like tentacles. I talked about the strange feeling of significance it had carried.

And I also talked about how I’d seen a small piece of stone in the shape of a gear that fit directly over the carven hole that, when replaced, opened up a chamber containing a single fenestrated wall.

A wall which, incidentally, I had on hand. She didn’t have time to react before I deployed it an inch from her stupid fucking face, before the hand of our Thief reached through and caught her by the temples, before hundreds of millions of years of Time were sucked from her body leaving it a bare wisp of dust, before the raw power of nothingness she had been holding burst outward from her weakened form in a puff of emptiness, impotent without a Witch to manipulate it into a slavering maw.

So yes, I survived. So too, I assume, did the Thief of Time that saved my life that day. I haven’t seen him since, but I have no doubt that he’s alive. He has far too much Time on his hands.


End file.
